Five Tricks for Increasing B2B Sales Velocity, from Katie Layng, VP of Mid-Market Sales

It comes as no surprise to anyone in Sales that there’s been a dip in the meetings we can generate when we use the same old tactics quarter after quarter. The activity is still there from reps, but conversion rates aren’t — and we aren’t booking as many meetings as we used to.

So we’ve had to get creative with video and LinkedIn posts and have been getting personal with our more important, top-tier prospects to get their attention (in a good way). Where we used to be able to connect with someone over coffee or at an event, now the only way to reach people is digitally – and we’re over it.

My tips for Sales teams

1. Get creative!

One thing that we know for sure is that there is no silver bullet for increasing pipeline. The best way to leverage your data is to get personalized, relevant, and creative in your messaging.

Here at Demandbase, we like to do Shark Week once a quarter, where we dedicate an entire week to generating sales pipeline through cold-calling, emails, videos, and more. It’s a company-wide effort, and we get pretty wild with it.

Learn more about Shark Week. 

2. Segment, segment, segment.

Segmentation is where you can start to get really strategic with selecting target accounts. With proper segmentation, you can understand when a target account is in-market and prioritize them to increase funnel velocity.

At Demandbase, we have a top 5 that our AEs, SDRs, Marketing, and leadership all get behind to close. These 5 accounts, as well as a top 30, are selected by the AE and SDR teams, and we leverage all of the data that we have on them including data from previous conversations with other accounts in that same market segment.

Learn more about how we do account segmentation.

3. Go beyond the sale

With Demandbase, we have the insights and ability to help post-sale, not just the Sales and Marketing pre-sale, but also upsell and cross-sell initiatives. But you can’t uncover those up- and cross-sell opportunities unless you’re in the know with your customers’ businesses and their priorities.

This is part of why personalization and segmentation are so important. You need to build strong executive-level relationships in order to drive business forward.

Learn more about uncovering growth opportunities that increase lifetime customer value.

4. Accelerate your current pipeline and opportunity velocity

I like to go back to the whys: why Demandbase and why now? We can use data and insights to answer those questions, and that’s how you should be approaching your customers and prospects with the answers to their questions — why this solution, and why now.

When you get personal with your insights and recommendations, you don’t just reach different personas and serve them relevant messaging, you also increase your opportunity velocity because you’re being empathetic.

Learn more about accelerating your current pipeline.

5. Leverage Demandbase Insights for outbound strategy

The beauty of our platform feature Pipeline Predict is that it leverages intent data and predictive modeling to determine whether a company looks like one of your customers. It looks at how well the behaviors that they show line up with the behaviors your customers showed before they became customers.

Learn more helpful insights for outbound strategy.

Back to basics

When we get into a demo, it’s easy to slip into showing off all of the bells and whistles of our products – we’re proud of them and that isn’t a bad thing – but we all need to take a breath and go back to the basics.

If you don’t know who your customers and prospects are or their biggest challenges, then you can’t show them how you can help them. Instead of getting bogged down in one feature or another, go back to the value that your product brings to the table and then highlight features that lessen their pain points.

We’ve all heard someone say that “people buy from the people they like,” and it’s true. If you can build a relationship on trust and your customers and prospects can see that you want to help them, you gain credibility. So go back to value-based conversations instead of focusing on features and functions.

The end?

Thought that was everything? I’ve still got plenty of tricks up my sleeve. Be sure to tune in to DBTV where I sit down and talk about increasing opportunity velocity, accelerating the sales cycle, and more.

Check out DBTV, featuring a variety of shows, ranging from thought leadership programming to profiles in customer success. This is your one-stop on-demand streaming hub for all the latest in B2B Go-To-Market.